Head of Israeli Commando Unit Killed by a Collapsing Wall

By JAMES BENNET

Published: February 15, 2002

KARNI CROSSING, Israel, Feb. 15 — After losing a tank and three soldiers in a Palestinian attack near here Thursday night, the Israeli Army was struck a second blow today, when the leader of an elite commando unit was killed by a falling wall while his troops were demolishing a Palestinian militant's home in the West Bank.

Tonight, in retaliation for the tank's destruction, Israeli warplanes fired rockets at two offices of the Palestinian security forces in the Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City, wounding 15 people, Palestinian security officials said.

On Thursday night, near a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip, a powerful bomb hidden in the sandy soil blasted the turret off an Israeli tank's carriage, killing three of four soldiers inside. The fourth soldier survived the attack with only a scratch on his head, the Israeli Army said.

It was the first time that Palestinian militants had destroyed such a substantial Israeli weapon, a feat even the Lebanese group Hezbollah never accomplished during almost 20 years of battling Israeli forces in Lebanon.

But Israeli Army officials said that Thursday night's attack had the hallmarks of a Hezbollah operation, evidence, they said, of growing ties between Iranian-backed groups in the region.

Until now, attacks on tanks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip seemed largely symbolic, and the soldiers riding in them seemed untouchable. Children would throw stones at the vehicles in what seemed an expression of frustration and a performance for watching cameras rather than any attempt at harm.

But the stark evidence that even the Israeli flagship tank, the Merkava 3, is vulnerable to Palestinian antitank weapons fanned fears today that Israeli forces are facing the same kind of punishing war of attrition in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that they fought so long in Lebanon.

"Last night's incident, all at once, moved the reality in the territories a step up, right into the difficult days of Lebanon," the columnist Rafi Mann wrote in the newspaper Maariv. In its symbolic power, he compared the destruction of the tank to the shooting down of an F-16 warplane or a helicopter.

Today Israeli tanks and bulldozers swept the area of Thursday night's attack, searching for other explosives.

They also destroyed several greenhouses and at least one home, Palestinian security forces said. And, the Palestinian officials said, Israeli aircraft twice bombed a nearby headquarters of the Palestinian security forces. Soldiers prevented journalists from entering the area and declined to discuss the operation.

The Sallahadin Brigades, a group made up of members of the Islamic group Hamas and Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that it was in retaliation for an Israeli incursion into Gaza on Wednesday that left five Palestinians dead.

"Challenge generates challenge," said Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader in Gaza. Referring to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he added, "This operation is a lesson for Sharon, that despite whatever weapons they have we can do such a thing."

Israel conducted its raid into Gaza on Wednesday in response to the firing of two Hamas rockets, known as Qassam-2, into southern Israel from Gaza on Sunday. No one was injured in that attack.

Obviously proud of the tank's destruction, Mr. Abu Shanab pointed out that the attack was conducted on a military, not a civilian target, and took place outside the borders of pre-1967 Israel.

Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leader, is seeking to establish a state in Gaza and the West Bank, lands Israel occupied in the 1967 war. Members of Fatah argue that, as long as the 16-month conflict rages, they are justified in attacking soldiers in those territories. Hamas, however, has never accepted the existence of an Israeli state within any borders.

In Thursday night's attack, a bomb was first detonated near an armored convoy headed for the isolated settlement of Netzarim. Gunmen then opened fire on the convoy, said Itzhak Levi, the driver of the settlers' bus.

It was as the tank responded to that attack that it was destroyed. That coordinated approach, Israeli officials said, was reminiscent of Hezbollah operations, which relied on such bait-and-kill tactics.

Before Thursday night, Israeli military officials were already drawing parallels to the experience in Lebanon, citing Palestinians' increased use of Hezbollah methods like roadside bombs and shooting ambushes.

Even the central characters are the same. Mr. Sharon was the defense minister who led Israel into Lebanon in 1982; Mr. Arafat, now as then the Palestinian leader, is as trapped in the West Bank city of Ramallah as he was besieged by Mr. Sharon's forces in Beirut.

This morning, in a hunt for Palestinian militants, the elite Israel Duvdevan undercover unit raided the village of Saida, near the West Bank city of Tulkarm.

In one of several exchanges of fire, the Israeli Army said, troops killed a Palestinian man who was later found to have a semi-automatic rifle and several grenades on his body.

Palestinians said that that the man, a member of the Islamic Jihad and the owner of a local restaurant, was gunned down when he tried to run out the back door of his house after it was besieged by Israeli soldiers. They said that the troops could have arrested him without shooting.

Israeli forces arrested at least five other men, all of whom it accused of attacking Israelis. Among them was Jasser Abdel Ghani, the local leader of Islamic Jihad.

After trading fire with soldiers, Mr. Abdel Ghani surrendered once armored bulldozers appeared outside his house, an Israeli army spokesman said. The commander of the unit, Lt. Col. Eyal Weiss, 34, led him away to what appeared to be a safe location, by a wall.

"At one point, when the tractor was completing its work, part of the house, either from the ceiling or from a wall, flew across the road and struck the wall behind which the united commander was standing," said Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Eitan, the commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank.

The wall collapsed, killed Lt. Col. Weiss on the spot, the Israeli army said.